The Tomorrow Children is a massive departure for developer Q-Games, who are best known for their PixelJunk series of games as addicting and stylish romps, are here with an entirely new endeavour and it’s nothing like they’ve done before. The whole premise behind the game is a resource gathering and town builder as you are tasked with making sure the area you build upon thrive, helping restore a desolate land that has been ravaged by a nasty Soviet experiment that wiped the world’s population nearly out.
A lot of the ideas behind The Tomorrow Children are great on paper, but, when to put them into motion can be difficult if you don’t do it right. The game begins with a tutorial set in the Void, and you play as a Comrade which is a projection clone that was created to rebuild humanity. You must rebuild your town and restore any humans you come across to normal.
The towns are online and are meant to be maintained by other Comrades online. You’ll grow the town, manage your resources and restore the population. It’s a rinse and repeat formula that’s been done many times but takes on a life of its own as you build a town with other players as you can see what they are doing, but cannot see them. This allows for some interesting gameplay and predictions on what your Comrades might be working on.
The downside of that idea of your fellow Comrades working on your town, too, can be a nuisance as any work you’ve spent time on can be wiped out if you don’t communicate on what each of you is doing. The fact you can’t see them in the town doesn’t help, often times the only way to communicate is with emoji or whistling.
The monsters you will encounter both in the wild of the Void and the ones who will attack your town, the Izverg, are monstrous as they will be continual threats to your town by destroying buildings and setting your progress back. The assortment of monsters reminded me of Japanese monsters attacking cities and levelling everything in their path. Luckily, if your town is armed, you stand a chance to annihilate them off the planet.
The ideas are here like I said and if you dig deep enough into the game you’ll find tons to unlock. What my gripe is, once you’ve completed the rather short and vague tutorial, well, you’re left to your own devices to choose your own path. This idea doesn’t work as I was left clueless on where to proceed for a short time, rather than learn as I went along.
The Tomorrow Children is an interesting concept that gets fumbled in the execution. The world, the characters, and the ideas are unique but it’s the gameplay that needs some reworking as it feels hollow. Tomorrow Children is a visual delight, though, as it stands it’s definitely one of the more unique games I’ve played, and the team over at Q-Games has created a stellar style with their world. The game will launch later in the year as a free-to-play.
The Tomorrow Children
Pros
- The visuals are wonderful
- Online community building is great
Cons
- Repetitive gameplay
- You can't see others online
